How to Maintain Culture in a Growing Company

A few months ago we put out a call for YOUR company culture questions and received many amazing questions — about everything from leadership to L&D. Our community submitted so many questions, in fact, that our experts weren’t able to get to them all during our virtual fireside chat (watch it here!).

Luckily, our Culture Strategists eat, sleep, and breathe company culture, so they readily jumped in to help.

Bringing us to this question from Elisa:

“What’s the best way to get leaders to see that your culture isn’t keeping pace with internal changes?”

David’s Tips on Scaling Culture During Change:

Work with leaders to identify the employee behaviors necessary to execute on your business strategy

Determine how consistently these behaviors are showing up in the day-to-day

Understand any gaps and close them by aligning programs, policies, communication with these desired behaviors

Looking for a partner to help you maintain culture in your growing company?

Video Transcript

Hello, David Shanklin from CultureIQ here, answering another one of your fireside chat questions.

So Elisa writes in: We’re going through change, and our culture change isn’t keeping pace. What’s the best way to get leaders to see that?

Elisa thanks for your question. In our experience, the best way to engage leaders in the conversation is to tie culture (or the internal employee behaviors that are present at your company) to business strategy. It sounds like your business is changing and your culture isn’t “keeping up.”

I’d recommend asking your leaders: what employee behaviors are necessary for us to successfully execute on our strategy?

You can then quickly follow up with something like: how consistently do you believe those behaviors are showing up in our day-to-day activities.

This is basically a quick and dirty gap analysis to help leaders realize the disconnect that exist. And then based on their answers, there are a lot of things and a lot of actions you can take to more clearly set expectations around the behaviors that you want and to align organizational processes — like performance management, recognition and employee development — with these desired behaviors.

Elisa, hope this has been helpful. As always, feel free to reach out to us at CultureIQ anytime, we’d love to help. Thanks so much!

AuthorJamie Nichol

Jamie brings people together to connect and collaborate around company culture. She enjoys looking at her daily art calendar, seeking “friluftsliv,” and talking about Australian Shepherds (or dogs in general) any chance she gets. If you want to chat about company culture, feel free to shoot her an email at jamie@cultureiq.com.